An Analysis Of Discussion Texts From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Discussion texts, a kind of argumentative texts often used for academicdiscussion, are very common in academic research and practice. This particular formof academic text is used to promote academic thinking, express personal opinions andexchange theoretical findings. When some scholar disagrees with or questions somestatement or opinion, he would write a discussion text to discuss the problem with thetarget author. For the purpose of academic discussion and exchange, the authors striveto be objective, but inevitably personal position and point of views are involvedthrough various selections in lexico-grammar. Meanwhile, the authors of discussiontexts also try to establish contact with readers and to gain their support. Inconsideration of all this, this thesis studies the evaluative meaning of Chinese texts ofsuch a particular genre.The study on interpersonal meaning in Systemic Functional Linguistics used tofocus on mood and modality system for a very long time. Since the1990s, JamesMartin and others have made a further improvement on the interpersonal meaning ofSystemic Functional Linguistics (hereafter SFL). They put forward the AppraisalTheory and its complete framework. However, there are still limited studies on theapplication of Appraisal Theory to discussion texts in Chinese discourse.On the basis of SFL, this thesis attempts to analyze the discussion texts whichare published on prestigious journals from the perspective of Appraisal Theory. As anew development in the SFL, Appraisal theory consists of three subsystems: attitude,engagement and graduation. The research method is primarily a qualitative analysisand supplemented by a quantitative analysis. The thesis analyzes the distributions ofappraisal resources in these discussion texts. To be specific, it deals with thedistributions of attitudinal resources, engagement resources and graduation resourcesrespectively. This thesis also intends to test the feasibility of Appraisal Theory for theanalysis of Chinese discourse, aims to provide a new angle for discussion texts and tooffer advice for the writing of discussion texts.This thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter acquaints the readers with the research background, contents, objectives, methodology, and also the data thethesis used. The second chapter reviews the previous studies on Appraisal Theory andits use on discourse analysis both at home and abroad. The third chapter introducesthe theoretical framework in detail—Appraisal Theory. The fourth chapter makes acomprehensive analysis of attitudinal resource, engagement resource and graduationresource in discussion texts respectively. The last chapter summarizes the whole thesis,states the major findings, innovation and limitation of the study and briefly describesthe suggestions for further studies.